WHAT IS STYLE?

Tone

(shift):

• Authoritative: Commanding
• Emotive: Evocative
• Pathos: Pity, Fear
• Didactic: Instructive, Lecturing
• Objective: Impartial
• Ornate: Complicated
• Scholarly: Academic, Esoteric
• Plain: Easy, Clean, Simple
• Scientific: educated, calculated

Diction:

• archaic language: old
• formal language: eloquent
• colloquial language: informal, common, vernacular
• ambiguous language: perplexing
• inflated language: (character only)
• satirical language: ironic wit
• effusive language: exclamatory

Selection of Detail

• verisimilitude: the appearance of being true or real (used with dialect)

Imagery

• auditory: sound
• visual: vision
• gustatory: taste
• tactile: touching
• olfactory: smell
• kinetic: movement, action (taking strides)
• organic: esthetic (nature)
• dark and light: Allegory of the Cave (Good vs. Evil)
• juxtaposed: side-by-side

Figurative Language:

• metaphor: compare two unlike things
• simile: compare two unlike things using like or as
• hyperbole: exaggeration
• understatement: to downplay something through voice.
• personification: often hidden in just the verb or the adjective. Giving anthropomorphic qualities to animals or inanimate movement
• synecdoche: a part represents the whole (hand in marriage)
• metonymy: An associated object to represent the entity that it is associated with (The White House spoke...)
• paradox (oxymoron): phrases that seem self-contradictory and illogical but actually make intuitive sense
• apostrophe: Speaking to a dead person or an inanimate or dead object (Speaking to the wind)

Point of View:

• First Person:
• Second Person (Beginning of ATKM)
• Third Person-Limited:Perspective of an observer on a scenario
• Third Person-Omniscient: Perspective of an observer on a scenario + the thoughts of others involved in the scenario.
• Stream of Consciousness: Philosophy in which the author tries to present all sensual perceptions and all intellectual concepts simultaneously.
• Alternating: multiple narrators provide multiple perspectives over the course of the book
• Narrator Reliability: Credibility of the first person narrator, often based off of his or her moral compass

Organization (including use of time):

• narrative structure:
• flashback: a return to the past
• framed story: An extended flashback (Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, To Kill a Mockingbird)
• formal: orthodox plot format (Slaughterhouse Five)
• informal: unorthodox plot format
• sonnet forms: 14 lines in iambic pentameter (Romeo and Juliet)
• villanelle: Series of three-line stanzas, where the last line of the stanzas is the same, yet alternates. The last stanza typically has four lines. Almost always six stanzas

Literary Terms Analyzing Contrast

• Verbal Irony: A character says the opposite of what they mean. Typically has an element of sarcasm. It has to be deliberate, but not necessarily malicious
• Situational Irony: When the opposite of what you expect to happen occurs.
• Dramatic Irony: Audience members have information that characters on the stage do not already know.
• Oxymoron: A phrase with elements that seem mutually exclusive of one another
• Paradox: Two situations that seem mutually exclusive of one another
• Juxtaposition: Contrast two objects side-by-side.

Sound (or musicality descriptors):

• euphony: hissing sounds. Sounds that move air through the pressing of tongue on teeth. Contains more open, long vowels
• cacophony: Percussive consonant. Sounds typically used in anger
• smooth diction: pacifying
• harsh diction: reprimandatory

Sound Devices:

• alliteration: same sound
• consonance: recurring consanants Not at the beginning or at the beginning and at the end
• assonance: recurring vowel sound
• onomatopoeia:

Rhyme:

• formal: very structured
• informal: some structure
• traditional: see formal
• unconventional: see informal
• absence of: lack of rhyme

Meter:

• formal: structured, typically iambic pentameter
  • example: For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
    That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (Shakespeare Sonnet 29)
• informal: variance in length
• traditional: see formal
• unconventional: no set pattern
• absence of: unpredictable with no set pattern

Allusion:

• historical: from historical events
• literary: other works of literature
• Biblical: from the bible
• mythological: Greek or Roman mytholocial allusions are also know as Classical allusion

• dramatic unity: all events take place within a day
• hubris: excessive or overweening pride
• catharsis: the Greek idea that people use art for emotional release
• Shakespearean:
• pop:

Repetition

• words
• images
• structural
• grammatical
• rhetorical (i.e. anaphora, etc.)

Sentence Types

• loose: The main point comes early in the sentence. Phrases and subordinate clauses that modify the point follow.
  • example: Mary Jane, a typically tranquil little girl, was distraught when her doll broke.
• periodic: In a periodic sentence, the punch line is saved for the end. A periodic sentence begins with modifying phrases and/or clauses and ends with the main thought, the independent clause.
  • example: Throughout thick and thin, Forrest Gump remained loyal to Jenny
• parallel: Parallel structure means using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. This can happen at the word, phrase, or clause level.
  • example: James owns a Lamborghini, a Bugatti, and a Ferrari.